Category: Impact

“A research network funded with millions by the Affordable Care Act will begin conducting vast studies next year to compare standard medical treatments. But what about the 100 million patients in the network — do they have a choice in the matter?
Will researchers get permission from each of those patients? And if patients are told about the studies, what, exactly, will they be told? These questions have bioethicists, scientists and health care officials debating how to bring the question of patient informed consent into the 21st century.
Obamacare is best known for extending health coverage to more Americans. But the health care law has many provisions aimed at improving health care outcomes and safety while lowering costs. One element is “comparative effectiveness” research: not just finding out whether a drug or treatment is safe and effective but comparing drugs head to head to find out which is better, for everyone or certain populations.
And with electronic medical records and vast pools of data, some of these studies have the potential to make lightning-fast, dramatic discoveries. But informed consent issues have the potential to slow such studies and make them too expensive.”

“Dive Brief:
•In an effort to reduce the backlog of contested Medicare claims, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has offered to pay hospitals 68% of what they say they are owed for short-term inpatient stays.
•The system of hearings on challenged claims has been on hold since December, when the HHS Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals temporarily suspended most new requests for administrative law judge hearings on payment denials by recovery audit contractors.
•Hospitals will have 60 days to decide whether to accept CMS’ offer, which does not apply to any short-term hospital admission that occurred after October 1, 2013.”

“Josiah Citrin’s Melisse and Suzanne Goin’s Lucques, The Larder restaurants, Tavern and the new AOC are just the latest in a group of Los Angeles restaurants implementing a 3% employee benefit surcharge to all guest checks..
Goin, along with Citrin and Rustic Canyon’s Josh Loeb and Zoe Nathan all made the announcement to add the surcharge in recent newsletters to customers. The surcharge started showing up on guest checks Monday.
“To us, when we rolled it out, we thought people would want to support places that are supporting their staff,” Loeb told The Times. “I would do that. If I knew a place was supporting their staff, I’d want to go there.”
According to Loeb, the decision to add a surcharge rather than increase menu prices was twofold.
“We wanted to have our menu prices be an accurate reflection of ingredient costs, and we also wanted give customers a little bit of control and power,” said Loeb. “If we were to call out every ingredient price increase, how do you designate where the line is drawn?””

“Enrolling in Missouri’s Medicaid program has not been easy.
Many applicants have experienced a barrage of problems when trying to sign up for the program, including long delays until coverage kicks in, lost paperwork and a lack of one-on-one interaction with caseworkers. State officials have blamed a new computer system used to process Medicaid applications.
But there is another reason why some Missourians struggle to get help.
When Deborah Weaver, 28, had issues enrolling in the state’s Medicaid coverage for pregnant women, a switch from her Medicaid disability coverage, she was directed to use a toll-free number, 1-855-373-4636. When she called, Weaver endured long waits and received no guidance.
“I called them three or four times and each time it would take a minimum of 15 to 20 minutes to get through to a human being, only to be given the runaround,” Weaver said.
One time the wait dragged on for so long, Weaver ended the call, worried she was racking up too many minutes on her family’s cellphone plan.”

“It’s not a news flash that health insurance can be complex and confusing. But the health insurance maze can be a problem, especially if you have never had health insurance before or have not had it for a long time. That’s the case for about half of the uninsured and for many people enrolling in the new insurance marketplaces set up under the Affordable Care Act.
Consider:
37% of enrollees don’t know the amount of their deductible. The deductibles in the plans sold on the exchanges are large; on average $2,300 for single coverage in the most popular plan, a Silver plan. For many people their deductible will be as important to their family budgets and their ability to get health care as the premium they pay, especially if they get a premium subsidy as most do in the exchanges. If people don’t understand their deductibles and copays they may pick a plan based solely on the premium and be in for a nasty surprise when they begin to use care and their deductible hits. It can also be important to know if services such as some physician visits and tests or generic drugs are exempt from the deductible.
Speaking of the subsidies, 46% of enrollees in the new insurance marketplaces say they’re getting a subsidy, when official numbers indicate about 85% actually get them. And even among those who know they’re receiving a subsidy, 47% don’t know the amount of the subsidy. A political implication is that many people getting help from the ACA don’t know it.
Many enrollees also don’t grasp basic insurance terms. A study of people eligible to enroll in the marketplaces showed that many were not confident in their understanding of a premium (36%), deductible (31%), copayment (28%), coinsurance (48%), maximum annual out-of-pocket spending (38%), provider network (36%), covered services (35%), annual limits on services (39%) or excluded services (40%).”

“The District of Columbia U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington on Thursday said the full 11-member court will rehear (PDF) the controversial case that ruled Americans could not receive subsidies to help pay for plans on federally run health insurance exchanges. Oral arguments will begin Dec. 17.
The court’s decision to rehear the case en banc, which experts said is rare for the D.C. appellate court, vacates the judgment issued earlier this summer. On July 22, a three-judge panel ruled 2-1 in Halbig v. Burwell that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act forbade people with lower incomes from receiving tax subsidies from insurance marketplaces run by the federal government, effectively making those subsidies illegal in 36 states.
Opponents of the Affordable Care Act greeted the D.C. court’s initial ruling with praise, saying the judges upheld the text of the law. The law’s supporters, however, argued the court read the text too narrowly and applied an unreasonable and inaccurate interpretation of exchange subsidies.
The July ruling dealt a fresh blow to President Barack Obama’s healthcare law, which relies on the insurance subsidies to make coverage more affordable for millions of people. However, the Obama administration vowed at the time to petition for a full court review of the decision.”

“Unlike the financial services industry, health care companies lack measures to adequately prevent identity theft, even as they continue to digitize medical records and other sensitive information.
Twelve years ago, when Nikki Burton was 17, she tried to donate blood for the first time. She was denied without explanation. Perplexed, the Portland, Ore. resident called Red Cross headquarters to inquire, only to learn that her Social Security number had been used to receive treatment at a free AIDS clinic in California, rendering her ineligible to donate blood.
Years later, she wondered if, when asked whether she had any preexisting conditions, that instance of fraud might show up. So she called the Red Cross again. The organization told her that it no longer asked for Social Security numbers and she could donate blood without it. “I said, that’s fine for you guys to receive the donation, but that doesn’t solve the problem of that information existing in your system,” Burton says. “What if it got out?”
In 2013, the health care industry experienced more data breaches than it ever had before, accounting for 44% of all breaches, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. It was the first time that the medical industry surpassed all others, and stood in stark contrast to the financial services industry, which represented just 3.7% of the total.
Identity theft is so pervasive in health care that, according to a 2013 ID Experts data security survey of 91 healthcare organizations, 90% of respondents had experienced a data breach in the previous two years and 38% had had more than five incidents.”

“Unhappy with the choices her insurance broker was offering, Denver publishing company owner Rebecca Askew went to Colorado’s small business health insurance exchange last fall. She found exactly what she’d been hoping for: affordable insurance options tailored to the diverse needs of her 12 employees.
But Askew is in a tiny minority. Only 2 percent of all eligible businesses have checked out so-called SHOP (Small Business Health Options Program) exchanges in the 15 states where they have been available since last October under the Affordable Care Act. Even fewer purchased policies.
In November, three more state-run SHOP exchanges are slated to open, and the federal government will unveil exchanges for the 32 states that chose not to run their own.
SHOP exchanges were supposed to open nationwide on Oct. 1, the same day as exchanges offering health insurance for individuals. But the Obama administration postponed the SHOP launch, citing the need to fix serious technical problems with the exchanges for individuals, which it said were a higher priority.”

“Republicans vying to wrest the Kentucky House from Democratic control for the first time in nearly a century promised Tuesday to try to repeal the state’s Medicaid expansion and rein in other parts of the federal health care overhaul.
House Republican leaders made stops in western Kentucky as part of a multi-day tour to promote their legislative agenda, called the “Handshake with Kentucky.” They said they would push for legislation prohibiting mandatory participation in a workplace union and for a revamped state tax code and creation of medical expert panels to review proposed medical malpractice claims before they could be pursued in court.
“If the people of Kentucky entrust us with the majority, we are committing to immediately begin debate with the intention of passing each of these pieces of legislation,” House GOP Floor Leader Jeff Hoover said.
State Democratic Party Chairman Dan Logsdon called them “warmed over” ideas repackaged to get Republicans to the polls.
“It’s not leadership,” he said. “It’s pandering to their base.”
Republicans have not had a majority in the Kentucky House since 1920. Democrats have been whittled to a 54-46 majority, putting the GOP within striking distance of consolidating power in the Kentucky General Assembly. Republicans have solid control of the state Senate.”

“The disputes between Oracle and Oregon are forcing the state to grow more dependent on the federal government to manage health insurance sign-ups.
“We needed some extra services from Oracle in order to do some additional development on the Medicaid side, but they declined to offer any service beyond their current contract,” transition project director Tina Edlund said Tuesday. “We moved those services over to the state data center.”
Edlund’s team is working to move the state health exchange to the federal healthcare.gov, and also move the Medicaid eligibility determination function to the Oregon Health Authority, both jobs Cover Oregon was supposed to handle. Oracle and Oregon are suing each other in state and federal courts, seeking to blame the other for the failure of those projects.”